Conclusively demonstrating why you should listen to others…
I have hired a lot of people. I have hired more men than women. I have also hired a greater proportion of female applicants than male. Both of these are critical to understanding the bias in my field (software development) and what to do about it. Also, both are indirect results of something else.
Most of the industry optimizes hiring decisions for individual performance. They assume the best company performance comes from strong individual performance.
They are wrong.
I can change the rate at which I learn things. So can you. It doesn’t depend on topic or natural inclination. It doesn’t depend on intelligence. It’s all in how I set up my learning experience.
I am not a professional instructional designer but I pair with them. I am a professional coach. And I am a professional learner. Here are the techniques I use to learn, instruct, and coach more effectively. I hope you find them useful. Continue reading “Learning faster and more deeply”
Someone I know had the following conversation recently during code review:
- [WontFix] //depot/[elided].cs: Line 232
- [reviewer]: Unit test this directly
- [author]: the integrations test this. Don’t see any direct benefit of UT it directly. (26 minutes ago)
He wanted advice on how to get past this. His goal is to get his team to write direct unit tests, as opposed to multi-unit component and integration tests. But how? And what does he do in code review to help the team accomplish that in specific cases? Continue reading “Using code review to support change”
I have noticed a significant difference in the results achieved by teams with pairing depending on how they approach learning to pair.
In particular, many people don’t expect pairing, itself, to be a skill. They don’t realize that they’re going to have to learn new ways to think, to problem solve, to be creative, to filter their perceptions, and even to converse. Since they don’t realize this, they get surprised. And then they set themselves up to make that learning hard, and quit when they get poor results and find pairing to be hard while learning. Continue reading “Is Pair Programming for Me?”
I was calmly reading stuff when someone said something wrong on the internet. I got angry. It touched a common nerve so I got angry out of all proportion. I decided to respond to my anger…by saying stupid stuff on the internet that others can use to make themselves angry.
What made me angry? In the talk about values, the author said the following:
We humans are inherently complex and, while logical thinkers, we are also led by our emotions and some inherent animalistic traits that can’t reasonably be overcome.
Bullshit! I am not logical! How dare you denigrate me so! (as I said, angry.) Continue reading “Emotions vs. Logic. Round 1. Fight!”